I believe it is possible to give even beginning students some sense of rhetorical
strategies with instructional materials that are properly selected to reflect events typical
of experiences that learners and those who must interact with them encounter. Through
discussion and through systematic analysis of one's own interaction in culturally diverse
situations, one can become aware of differences in rhetorical strategies. In the most
general terms, what this analysis involves is learning to separate discourse level form
from discourse level content, somewhat in the way that I have tried to do it in my
examples. There is some evidence, however, to suggest that by having been exposed to
language learning experiences a person gains a better sense of how to go about doing this
and thus to learn from interactive experience. It is in this sense that language instruction
may prepare us for meeting the cognitive demands of multicultural environments.

Kaplan, R. B. ( 1968). Contrastive grammar: Teaching composition to the Chinese student. Journal of
English as a Second Language, 3( 1), 1-13.

Lambert, R. (Ed.). ( 1987). Foreign language instruction: A national agenda. The Annals of the
American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 490.

Lange, D. L. ( 1987). "The language teaching curriculum and a national agenda". In
R. Lambert (Ed.), Foreign language instruction: A national agenda. The Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Sciences, 490.

Larsen-Freeman, D. ( 1987). Recent innovations in language teaching methodology. In
R. Lambert
(ed.), Foreign language instruction: A national agenda. The Annals of the American Academy of
Political and Social Sciences, 490.

Lehmann, W. P., &
Jones, R. L. ( 1987). "The humanistic basis of second language learning". In
R. Lambert
(Ed.), Foreign language instruction: A national agenda. The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Sciences, 490.

Print this page

While we understand printed pages are helpful to our users, this limitation is necessary
to help protect our publishers' copyrighted material and prevent its unlawful distribution.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.